‘The Long Death of Adolf Hitler’ by Caroline Sharples review

Fumbling for the keys to his Mercedes in a vain attempt to reach his carphone before it stops ringing, an aged but instantly recognisable Adolf Hitler all but ignores a hearty ‘Buenas noches, mein Führer’ from an elderly Nazi cycling past on an upmarket South American street, his arm extended in the time-honoured salute. Thus did The Simpsons riff on the idea of Adolf Hitler’s survival some 50 years after his death. As the historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has shown, alternative histories in which Hitler is alive and well have been a commonplace of fiction and film since the end of the Second World War. In her readable and well-researched book, focusing on political and legal debates rather than cultural representations, Caroline Sharples shows that rumours that Hitler was ‘enjoying his retirement in Argentina’ were common currency by the mid-1950s; speculation placing him there first emerged as early as the summer of 1945 when an American press report, picked up in Britain, confidently asserted that he was now residing with Eva Braun on an expansive estate in Patagonia.

Sharples’ history of the ‘long death’ and ‘eventful afterlife’ of Adolf Hitler begins with his suicide in the Berlin ‘Führerbunker’ on 30 April 1945, covering the popular and diplomatic reactions to his demise. While across the world jubilant crowds burned his effigy at VE Day celebrations, Germans furtively removed pictures and keepsakes from their homes. Sharples then examines the political, legal, and moral issues arising from dealing with his (purported) remains. She makes a persuasive case for the uniqueness of the manner of Hitler’s death among dictators in modern history, the circumstances of which – not least the lack of witnesses or, more importantly, a corpse – informed subsequent discourse around the fate of the dictator. Taking her story up to the present, she demonstrates that the enduring uncertainties ensured a ‘very long death’ indeed. The FBI continued to receive correspondence from Americans sharing details of their ‘sightings’ of Hitler into the 1960s. ‘The first thing you are going to think [is that] I am some sort of a crackpot or crank’, one such informant fretted in May 1961 before sharing a ‘hot tip’ that she had dreamt that Hitler was alive and living in Uruguay.

The book follows a broadly chronological structure, with the lion’s share dealing with the late 1940s, a key period in which proof of death, whether in the form of Hitler’s will or his mortal remains, was feverishly sought, and the intervening decades considered only in its final quarter. There is a strong transnational focus considering exchanges across borders, both in terms of media coverage and with regard to diplomatic and political manoeuvring. Hitler’s demise posed a dilemma for neutral and allied states as to whether to offer their condolences. Ireland’s Éamon de Valera, ignoring the advice of his colleagues, chose to do so (the standard response drafted by his private secretary, countering that the same had been done to mark the death of President Roosevelt just weeks before, is unlikely to have fully placated the critics) while flags were lowered in Portugal in the first week of May 1945.

Sharples’ overwhelming emphasis on the years immediately following Hitler’s death means that certain later developments, including specifically German ones, do not feature. There is nothing, for example, on the so-called ‘Hitler nostalgia wave’ (or simply ‘Hitler wave’) of the 1970s, recently analysed by scholars such as Tobias Becker. This surge of interest in the dictator some 30 years after his death – a ‘cult of Hitler flourishing in thin disguise’ in the Federal Republic of Germany – manifested in a profusion of articles, as well as radio and television documentaries dealing with the man and his regime. When Werner Maser published his biography Adolf Hitler: Legend, Myth, Reality in 1971, it was received in the context of the ‘wave’ and criticised for its ‘intense concern with Hitler’s person’ in a 1974 review by the American historian Rudolph Binion. Maser’s book included the assertion that the Soviet autopsy – the subject of a 1968 book by Russian journalist Lev Bezymenski, who had been present at the Battle of Berlin – had examined remains which were not, in fact, Hitler’s. This contention stoked much debate; for Binion, clearly, such matters were of no consequence, and indicative of a deeply flawed study which owed its success entirely to the unsavoury fascination with the dictator prevailing in West Germany at the time. While Maser’s book is not discussed by Sharples, she notes the historian’s reappearance in 2000 to once again reject the authenticity of Russian claims, this time relating to skull fragments displayed as Hitler’s in Moscow that year.

Indeed there is something of a chronological leap in Sharples’ book, with the period from the 1960s to the 1980s somewhat neglected, perhaps because of her focus on key discoveries and significant developments, such as the official issuing of a death certificate in October 1956. Thus an urgent, present-tense account of Hitler’s death published under the headline ‘A Shot – and Hitler is Dead!’ on the event’s 20th anniversary in 1965 by Bild, Germany’s most-read newspaper, does not feature. The article describes Goebbels finding his boss dead, skull shattered, before the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun are ‘doused in petrol and set alight’; the inhabitants of the bunker then immediately light cigarettes (having not been allowed to do so while Hitler was alive) to steady their nerves. Readers will also have to turn to Rosenfeld (in particular his 2014 book Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture) for analysis of more recent cultural manifestations of this obsession, such as Timur Vermes’ bestselling comic novel Look Who’s Back (2012), subsequently turned into a film. Sharples offers only some brief concluding comments on other cinematic representations such as 2004’s Downfall (which has spawned uncountable memes in which Hitler reacts to 
the death of Michael Jackson, Barack Obama’s presidential victory, and the news that he has tested positive for Covid-19, among others).

That said, the author impressively engages not only with scholarly literature but also with less reputable (and supposedly factual) publications advancing the idea that Hitler did indeed escape from Germany in the dying days of the Third Reich: the endurance of such conspiracy theories is apparent from the fact that more than half of the books cited by Sharples as peddling such ‘survival myths’ were published in the last 20 years. Primary source material has been utilised to particularly good effect, not least diaries recording contemporary German reactions to news of Hitler’s suicide. Shock and sorrow dominate: ‘He’s at peace now … but what about us? We’re adrift and abandoned.’ Contemporary national and local press reports have been particularly well combed for insights into rumours and controversies around the dictator’s fate, from psychic predictions of his demise during the first half of the Second World War, to coverage of the recreation of Hitler in the bunker unveiled at Berlin’s Madame Tussauds in 2008. ‘We would be upset if he becomes the focus of the exhibition’, said director Suzanne Keller, shortly before its opening was marred by the second visitor through the door tearing the head from the waxwork.

‘The End of That Man At Last’, a Daily Express headline of October 1956 announced, ‘And That’s Official’. It was among the many press reports in Britain and elsewhere on the official announcement of Hitler’s suicide, 11 years after it happened, by the district court in his former home of Berchtesgaden. Yet 62 years later, upon the identification of fragments of Hitler’s jaw in 2018, journalists felt the need to once again announce that ‘Hitler is dead – really’. As Sharples acknowledges, thanks to an enduring ‘appetite for dramatic stories with an air of conspiracy’, legal and biological facts have never been a barrier to an enduring fascination with the idea of Hitler’s downfall – and his possible survival. Her book is an indispensable guide to the afterlife of the death of ‘that man’, a story which, fully 70 years after its belated confirmation, only seems likely to continue.

• The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History
  Caroline Sharples
  Yale University Press, 336pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Paul Moore is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leicester.